Convar BytePac Eco-Friendly Paper Hard Drive Enclosure Review

As Green As It Gets

We’ve all seen extremes in efforts to be as “green” and eco-friendly as possible. Convar, a German company responsible for the BytePac product, has taken this concept and turned it into a very intriguing and simple product idea. Convar bills the BytePac as “the greenest and most practical way of ensuring your data is safe for the future”.

What is it exactly? Well, it’s an external drive enclosure comprised entirely of cardboard! It sounds a little ghetto but if you think about it, what does an enclosure do besides house and protect the drive? Cardboard boxes are used to house and protect a variety of items every day, mainly for transport, so why not construct a more specialized box? We all know how bad plastics are for the environment, from manufacture to disposal, and the eons it takes for them to biodegrade. The pricing is very reasonable as well, for three of the enclosures and one set of the cables for connection they are asking $53.93 USD (tax included).

Rather than attempt to describe it further, we’ll defer to the video on the BytePac product page to provide a demonstration.

BytePac Features:

1 SATA / USB 2 or USB 3 Connection Kit﻿

3 Empty boxes

3 Sleeves

3 Sets of labels

2.5″ Adapter﻿

An outer sleeve covers the actual cardboard drive enclosure and made from the the same cardboard material, albeit much thinner than what is used in the rest of the product. The sleeve has a cutout for the holes built into the enclosure to facilitate air circulation. The shipping box itself converts directly into the archive box to hold the three BytePac enclosures so no waste when it comes to packaging material.

On the back side, the sleeve has a cutout for the part of the enclosure that pops out and locks in to elevate the drive to accommodate air circulation and cooling underneath.

On one side is the BytePac name and a logo signifying the eco-friendly nature of the product.

The other side has an area that can be used to label the enclosure for reference when shelved.

With the outer sleeve removed, the drive enclosure can be opened from the side, revealing the inner design which we’ll have a closer look at later on. Right now you are asking yourself why can’t you just get some boxes and a knife and start cutting your own. Well, technically you can, but the BytePac is cut from one piece of cardboard and doesn’t use any adhesives to hold it together. It’s also manufactured to very tight tolerances to fit the drives snugly and keep everything neat and tidy. Replication of this without the proper equipment would be difficult at best.